Coudal Partners

Ulyssesby James Joyce

Field-Tested by Josh Kimball

in Transit

I am a slow reader and I am stupid.

I read Ulysses in the fall of 2002. And in the winter of 2002. Also, in the spring, the summer, the fall, and the winter of 2003. When I started it, I lived in Boston. I read five or six pages at a time, on the bus, on the way to work and back. I loved it. I read 30 or 40 pages every day. Buck Mulligan. Leo got drunk. Id stand at the transfer stop in Watertown, waiting, turning the pages, hoping that the people who left the nearby veterinarians office would see me reading such a stack of a book.

It got colder. I dont read fast. I read five or eight pages a day. I didnt like it. I didnt want anyone to see me reading it anymore  still  three or four months later. I read it at night, in bed, when we had packed up all of our boxes to move. We lived with those boxes packed for a month while I read that book in the dark, in our bedroom.

We moved to Minneapolis. I kept reading. Id cross the river, back and forth, going to work every day. I read a few pages each ride. I hated it. The book had been with me forever and it wasnt giving me anything anymore. I despised it right up until I could feel the end coming. Then, sitting there on the bus going back or forth from work, I began again, truly.

I finished Ulysses in Minneapolis. Or in St. Paul. Somewhere on this side of the Mississippi. Or the other side. I didnt like it or not like it. I think back on it now not like I think about an aesthetic experience constrained by my own limited personal perception and irrevocably framed by and conjoined to a specific chunk of space-time. I think of it not only as a thing; in a year; in a place. I think of it with the wariness I allow a person. I like it. I hate it. I dont care about it. I came to know it. It has to somehow know me.